Us: First trailer for Jordan Peele horror shows us we are our own worst enemy

Universal Pictures gave the world a most terrifying, scintillating gift bright and early on Christmas morning: the very first trailer for Jordan Peele's Us.

Uploaded to the official Us movie Twitter account, the footage opens on Black Panther co-stars Winston Duke and Lupita Nyong'o looking laidback and capital-C chill as married couple Adelaide and Gabe Wilson, cruising in their car to Luniz's 1995 single "I Got 5 On It." As Duke's Gabe sings along to the lyrics, his son Jason (Evan Alex) asks the meaning of the title, and his daughter (Shahadi Wright-Joseph) responds, "It's about drugs." There's a little banter between Gabe and the kids, Adelaide turns to show the two youngsters how to snap on beat to the music, and then the Wilsons meet up with the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker) on the beach at "vodka o'clock" for some sand-combing, sun-soaking, and day-drinking.

If you didn't know any better, or know what horrors Peele's mind is capable of producing, you'd probably mistake these snippets as a clips from a feel-good film about two families on vacation. Us is, unfortunately for those who love warm-lit comedy-dramas but thankfully for fans of all things blood-chilling, not that kind of movie.

Off the happy opening, things take a hard, sharp turn into darkness when Jason wanders alone down the beach and finds a person standing like a scarecrow, blood dripping down their fingertips. Adelaide eventually finds Jason and the Wilsons make it safely to Adelaide's childhood home in Northern California, where they'll be spending the summer. "Stick with me, that'll keep you safe," she tells him as she tucks him in for the night.

And when the night falls, more terrors rise.

The sky crackles with violent thunder and a shadow of a hand carrying a pair of scissors — the same scissors from the film's promo poster – swipes across the pavement. Jason, still wearing a monkey mask atop his head as he had been all day, tells his parents that there's a family in their driveway. While Gabe brushes concern aside, saying that it's likely just the neighbors, Adelaide is visibly worried, and tells her daughter to put her shoes on. But before the family can do anything to prepare themselves, and after Gabe's attempts at scaring the figures away by swinging a baseball bat and asking them if they want to "get crazy" prove fruitless, the mysterious foursome make their way into the Wilsons' home.

Even in the low light, the family can see that the intruders aren't their neighbors. They aren't their friends or enemies, either. They're… them — different versions of the characters played by the same actors.

"What are you people?" Gabe asks in horror, staring at versions of himself, Adelaide, and the children wearing red jumpsuits — with the alternate Jason crouched down on the floor and seen with a black-and-white monkey mask covering his face.

"It's us," Jason says.

"They look exactly like us. They think like us. They know where we are," Adelaide explains as the trailer flickers out footage of the creatures — monsters Peele previously revealed are known as the Tethered — standing in front of burning cars, crashing through sunroofs, and wielding enormous scissors. "We need to move and keep moving. They won't stop until they kill us. Or we kill them."

Yeah, we're betting the Wilsons didn't expect their summer holiday to turn out quite like this.

Catch all the creepiness — which includes ballet dancers, a boat, hordes of rabbits, what looks like a hospital hallway, and one insanely haunting laugh — in the video above.

It's obvious that there's a deeper meaning at play here between "the Tethered" and the scissors they use as their weapons. Do the creatures embody the worst parts of each person, or their most repressed traumas? Are they trying to "untether" the humans from some larger network of emotion and thought? Why do they want to kill their counterparts? What's with the freakin' rabbits? Did Adelaide accidentally kill a bunny when she was a child, and she's being punished for it now? Or do the rabbits, which tend to symbolize procreation, represent Adelaide's own fertility issues? Are her children not her own? And why does the Tethered version of Jason not have any lips? What does it all mean?

We're both confused and intrigued by this first trailer for Us, just as we expected to be after the twist Peele pulled in his directorial debut Get Out. Like Get Out, Us is also what Peele calls a "social thriller" — a film that demonstrates the "best and scariest monsters in the world are human beings and what we are capable of especially when we get together." Pinpointing the exact "social demons," the "innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact" that Peele has talked about in the past, that Us explores is a little difficult right now — but it's clear that the core of the movie's story is about how humans are their own worst enemy. The only thing scarier than a stranger wanting to kill you is… well, you wanting to instead.

In all, Matthew A. Cherry — who co-produced one of this year's best films, BlacKkKlansman, alongside Peele — was absolutely, without a doubt correct when he said "y'all are not ready" for Peele's next feature. He was "shooketh" after seeing the first trailer in advance of its official release, and now we are too.